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  Contents

  Foreword

  Part I

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part III

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part IV

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Hope and a Common Future

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  To the spirit of exploration

  and the dignity it brings home

  Foreword

  It was a dark and stormy sector. Suddenly, a starship appeared on the horizon. The Vulcan screamed! . . .

  Well . . . maybe not.

  When Diane first suggested that I write the foreword for Final Frontier, I accepted the task with the comforting thought that she had 127,000 words to write before I had to make good on this promise. Surely I could come up with a few paragraphs of insightful prose in the same amount of time.

  Surely . . .

  Now that we are a few days from sending the novel to Pocket Books, I feel much the same as I did in college on those Sunday nights when I had a term paper due on Monday morning. In those days, my best bet was to start with a list of possible topics in the hope that one would inspire me.

  One topic here could be revenge. I could repay Diane for putting me on the spot like this by describing what it’s like to be her husband and collaborator. Unfortunately, we’ve all heard so many eccentric-writer stories at conventions that anything I could say would be redundant. I think I’ll let this topic slide with merely a sidebar. Psychologists generally agree that a major childhood trauma will often result in people’s becoming thieves, murderers, drug addicts, prostitutes, or writers. Generally, I’m pleased that Diane chose the last. However, when the light clicks on at 3:00 A.M. because Captain Kirk is whispering something into Diane’s ear, I must admit that those thieves and murderers don’t look so bad.

  Another, always popular possibility would be to take a humorous look at our favorite shared-universe. I could, for instance, fantasize about being able to remove one scene from the series or the movies and rewrite it to my specifications. Which scene would it be? No, that might get me into trouble. And while Star Trek parodies are a lot of fun for true Trek fans, they are often misinterpreted by non-Trek people (the unclean) as ridicule of Star Trek.

  How about commenting on some of the technical and scientific . . . uh . . . liberties that were occasionally taken during the series to move the plot along. No, that would be longer than the book.

  Let’s try another tack.

  How, it is so often asked, could a twenty-year-old television show develop such a vast and loyal following? Even the fans can’t reach an agreement on this. Some people feel that the Star Trek characters, the “Four from the Enterprise” especially, are a classic combination of compassion, humor, and conflict that the years cannot diminish. Others argue that the series itself always aspired to be “a cut above,” its episodes not directed, like so much of television, at an audience with the collective IQ of a swarm of lobotomized houseflies. While I agree with these observations, I think that there is an even more important aspect of Star Trek that has made it so enduring—one that is often overlooked.

  For several thousand years, philosophical and religious leaders have been preaching that man is basically evil. When Star Trek was conceived in the 1960’s, this fact seemed to be demonstrated by the events all around us. We were plagued with war, racial unrest, pollution, overpopulation, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. These combined to support the belief that the human race was going to have a very short and miserable future on this planet. Those who looked into this future envisioned a massively over-populated, polluted world of such poverty and violence that we would all be locked into a daily life-and-death struggle for our basic needs. A very depressing outlook, to say the least. Star Trek thumbed its nose at our culture’s Chicken Littles by giving us a much more reassuring look at humanity.

  The overall theme of Star Trek must surely be that we have a grand future. Yes, we will have troubles. Some of them may seem insurmountable. But mankind is not just an upstart species, an aberration of nature destined to cause its own inevitable slide back into the muck. The creators of Star Trek wanted us to know that we are special, we are in charge of our destinies. That destiny can be a fine one as long as we never allow the problems of today to overwhelm our aspirations for the future. Diane and I consider it an honor to be part of the Star Trek universe and we will always try to maintain the respect for mankind that has made Star Trek an ever-increasing force in the social consciousness of today.

  Final Frontier is a Star Trek historical, taking place twenty-five years before James Kirk’s time aboard the Enterprise (the framework involving James Kirk takes place immediately after the television episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and the reader may wish to refer to it). Diane and I have worked conscientiously to project backward on both technology and philosophy, to a point where we can see the emergence of the Trek familiar to us all. This is before everything—before starship technology was polished, before Federation policy was tested, before captains really knew how to handle what they encountered. It involves the inevitable conflicts between our philosophies, our aspirations, and the brutal reality that often exists when intelligence clashes with intelligence. We hope that as Star Trek continues, more and more people who see life as merely a living and dying process without meaning or direction will stand with us and demand that “There must be more!”

  Gregory Brodeur

  Part I

  Space . . .

  Prologue

  A TIME BEFORE stardates. And a captain’s privilege to go there.

  Even with the unchanged cornfields lying beneath sprawling blue skies and the barn smell all around him, Jim Kirk discovered he couldn’t quite get away from reality when the communicator in his pocket suddenly chirped. His hand automatically went for the utility belt that usually held his phaser and communicator when he wasn’t on board the ship, and only then did he remember he wasn’t wearing a uniform.

  “Mind your own business, Bones,” he muttered as he found the device inside the lightweight indigo fabric of his sailing jacket. He snapped the grip open with too much ease—not something he ordinarily perceived in his movements—and spoke firmly into it. “Mind your own business, McCoy. I’m on leave.”

  “On leave and suddenly psychic, too, I see,” the familiar voice plunged back.

  “Who else has the gall to disobey direct orders?” Kirk shifted the communicator to his left hand and used his right to wrench open a sliding panel in the barn’s loft wall. Not easy; it hadn’t been open in—no, he didn’t want to count years right now. The eddies of time weren’t his best friends at the moment. The backwashes . .
.

  “What do you want?” he asked as he reached into the metal cubbyhole behind the panel of century-old barnwood. He was quite aware of the guilty hesitation on the other end of the frequency when McCoy didn’t answer right away.

  “I thought you might want company for dinner.”

  “That’s the best excuse you’ve got?”

  “Well, it’s hard to come up with a shipboard emergency hanging here in spacedock, you know. Dangling a juicy stuffed Cornish hen dinner in front of you was all I could come up with. I’m a surgeon, not a . . . not a . . . damn, I can’t think of anything.”

  “Then you have something to keep you busy,” Kirk said sharply. “There are some days when a man doesn’t want to be cheered up. Kirk out.”

  He flipped the grid closed and stuffed the communicator and everything it represented back into his pocket. In his mind he saw McCoy’s squarish face skewered with helpless empathy and knew he’d been unfair, but everything was unfair. Where was it written that a starship captain always had to be the exception? This wasn’t his day to be exceptional. Today he wanted to be what he remembered himself as—a tough, curly-haired blond kid with big aspirations and a painfully pragmatic edge to his imagination. He knew that if he looked out the loft door he’d see his mother peeking out the farmhouse window like she had during his entire boyhood, wondering what her son was thinking and not having the nerve to come out and ask. Either that or she just had more respect for his privacy than McCoy did.

  No surprise. Bacteria had more respect for privacy than McCoy did.

  Kirk shook away an urge to glance over his shoulder and reached into the hidden metal box inside the loft wall. Carefully he pulled out an uneven bundle of letters, ragged and yellowed, a bundle of Starfleet notepaper preserved only with a child’s obsessive care for something particularly precious. His lips curled up on one side as he ran his thumb across the discolored ink of a handwritten line.

  “Stone knives and bearskins,” he murmured. His throat closed around any further comment. Suddenly he was glad he was alone. He straightened up—certainly one thing that had been easier twenty-five years ago—strode through old hay to the loft door, and sat down in a wedge of sunlight with the bundle of notepaper.

  The sunlight on his face, real sunlight, made the natural ruddiness rise in his cheeks again. He could feel the color seep back into his skin, aware of how pale starship duty sometimes made him in spite of special whole-spectrum artificial lighting with all its pretense of sunlight. Like pills instead of solid food. The same, but not. Maybe that was because starship lighting had no warmth.

  Starship . . . how could a word so beautiful seem so sinister to him now? It hadn’t been the ship’s fault, this tragedy that crushed him to the Earth’s surface like sudden gravity. It hadn’t been McCoy’s fault, though McCoy felt otherwise. It hadn’t been Spock’s fault, though Spock hadn’t been able to help no matter how much he wanted to. So, it must be my own fault. My fault, because I earned command. And for my reward, I pay.

  Squinting in the bright daylight, he divided the pile in two, just for the sake of mystery, then picked up a letter and started reading.

  May 10, 2183

  Dear George and Jim

  This letter is going to be late reaching you—sorry. Your letter had to find me after being delivered to the wrong starbase. That’s Star Fleet for you—we can patrol the galaxy, but we can’t get a letter through.

  I feel bad about last month, troopers. I know I promised to be there, but there’s a problem with promises and you might as well learn it. Even fathers have to break them sometimes.

  George, I want you to know I’m proud of that green ribbon you won at the science fair. You already know more about biology than I ever could. I hung the ribbon right on the door of the base recreation deck, so everyone who goes in has to look at it. I’m getting congrats for you from all over the starbase.

  About the other idea, Jimmy—probably not. Space isn’t really very pretty when it’s all you have to look at. Someday you’ll appreciate having a planet under your feet when you look at the stars. Okay, so it’s not much of an answer.

  “No,” Kirk sighed, “it’s not. But I probably wasn’t listening anyway.” He leaned back on the gray barnwood and crossed his ankles, then indulged in a sip of the coffee he’d brought out here with him. Doused with honey and milk like his aunt used to make for him when she thought he was too young to take coffee black, it was more of a liquid candy bar than coffee. The taste of nostalgia.

  He tipped the crusty letter away from the sun and spoke to the handwriting.

  “Keep talking. I’m listening now.”

  Chapter One

  THE SECURITY COMMANDER set his pen down and spun the sensor camera roller, then gazed up at the row of monitors. Each monitor was carefully positioned so that he got a clear view of his own reflection, and it was a damned annoyance to always have to be looking past that fellow with the rusty red hair and the stern expression that reminded him of bleached-out dreams. He blinked to clear the reflection from his mind and looked toward the monitors, each of which showed a different compartment or lab or lounge on the starbase. At two o’clock in the simulated night, things were quiet. At least temporarily.

  The officer set the computer sentry on automatic survey, picked up his pen, and went back to his writing while he had the chance.

  Of course there’s no reason you can’t visit here when school’s over, boys. But living on Starbase Two is out of the question. After all, your mother has her own career to consider, and even as Chief of Security here, I wouldn’t have enough free time to make it worth your while to give up the life you have on Earth. There aren’t any meadows here, or any lakes, or frogs, or race tracks, or anything. Just labs, classrooms and simulators, and a couple of gyms not even big enough to throw a baseball in.

  He stopped writing, dissatisfied with the shielded truth he was sending home. Not even shielded truth. Shielded lies, really; better servants than a truth that would hurt the tender trust he was writing home to. At this point, trust meant more to him than truth. And he could never get far enough into space to ease the ache of his own integrity.

  Distraction was welcome when it came—the startling buzz of one of the monitors. He pressed a switch that stopped the buzz, and leaned forward. Like a lie detector working on physiological cues, the monitor farthest to the left had focused in on the pool hall, its sensors triggered by the infinitesimal rise in body heat and other stress factors interpreted as hostile by the computer. Four men were clustered around one of the pool tables—well, more precisely, three of the men were clustered around the fourth. The biggest of the three had the prey by the collar and was pressing him against the pool table.

  The security chief leaned still closer, his hazel eyes narrowing. He recognized the three as intersystem traders. “Scratch” Jones and his seamy crew. Local system troublemakers who stayed just close enough to a loose interpretation of the law that they were still allowed on the starbase to stock up, fuel up, and hawk their questionable services to anyone who would pay. But the tawny-faced, umber-haired man they were harassing was no trader. He was starbase personnel, and he had no business being there at this hour.

  “But fellows,” the tawny-faced one said in the accented but perfect English of the West Indies, “twice you’ve beaten me already. I’m better than you, I’m simply having a terrible day. The terrible-est. If I put my mind on it, I could smoke you.”

  “Sure, Reed,” one of the men responded. “I’ve heard that talk all night and I’m sick of the insults. I’m still waiting for a real game.”

  Scratch Jones tightened his grip on the starbase man’s neck. “Why don’t you put your mind ‘on it’ and put your month’s pay up against all of ours.”

  “I would, but lordy, I’ve got to go. I’m on duty, you see. It means my commission if I’m found here with you prehistorics.”

  “He’s got to go,” muttered the third trader. “What a coincidence.”


  “On the rail,” Scratch Jones growled.

  With some difficulty, since there was a two-hundred-pound man leaning against him, Drake Reed tugged his pay voucher from his pocket and placed it on the table’s rail beside him. He’d lost two games already, and his pay voucher looked like easy pickings to Jones’ crew as they too dumped handfuls of Federation credit slips and assorted interplanetary tokens, promissory notes, and other tender on top of the helpless Fleet ticket.

  Jones smiled and released Reed. He nodded to the bearded one of his herd. “Rack ’em up, Chainsaw.”

  Reed shrugged. “You’re going to need a warp power cue just to keep up with my juju, man.”

  “And chickens quack. You break.”

  Reed shook his head, catching the cue stick rudely tossed to him by Jones.

  In the security office, the chief tightened his weapons harness and kept an eye on the monitor while Reed flexed his shoulders beneath a standard red Starfleet uniform and leaned over the pool table. “Amateur night at Starfleet,” the chief muttered just as Reed’s cue made a sudden snap at the cue ball and the triangle of colored balls exploded across the table.

  Scratch Jones and his men dropped their jaws as at least half of the balls toppled neatly into convenient pockets. They’d seen nothing like that from Reed before this, the chief knew, and that’s where the trouble lay.

  When the balls stopped clacking into the pockets, Chainsaw shook his head and leered at Reed. “You can open your eyes now,” he mocked.

  With his brown eyes gleaming and quite open, Reed offered that innocent shrug again and responded, “Must have been a sudden gust of gravity . . .”

  “Better have been,” Jones growled. On the wake of his words, he drew a Rigellian dagger and held it with casual but naked threat. “Take your next shot, rum-runner.”

  The security chief quickly set the monitor on automatic and hurried out into the corridor to the security lift across the hall. Behind him the door panel to starbase security whispered shut.